The Book of Skulls (19 page)

He made his way to his own room, falling down a couple of times. When he woke, sober and aghast, it was late the next afternoon and he expected to find the police waiting for him downstairs. But there was no one there but his father and his stepmother and the servants. Nobody acted as if anything unusual had happened. His father smiled, asked him how the dance had gone. His sister was out with friends. She didn’t return until dinnertime, and when she came in she behaved as though everything was as it should be, giving Timothy a cool, distant, customary nod as a greeting. That evening she called him aside and said in a menacing, terrifying voice, “If you ever try anything like that again, you’ll get a knife in the balls, I promise you.” But that was the last reference she ever made to what he had done. In four years she hadn’t spoken of it once, at least not to him and probably not to anyone; she apparently had sealed the episode into some stony compartment of her mind, filing it away as a night’s unpleasantness, like an attack of the trots. I could testify that she maintained a perfect icy surface, playing the role of the eternal virgin no matter who or what had been into her.

That was all. That was the whole thing. When he was finished, Timothy looked up, drained, empty, gray-faced, a million and a half years old. “I can’t tell you how crappy I’ve always felt about doing something like that,” he said. “How much goddamned guilt I’ve had.”

“You feel better now?” I asked.

“No.”

I wasn’t surprised. I’ve never believed that opening your soul brings you surcease from sorrow. It just spreads the sorrow around some. What Timothy had told me was a dumb story, a sordid story, a downer, a bummer. A tale of the idle rich, mind-fucking each other in the usual fashion, worrying about virginity and propriety, creating little melodramatic operas starring themselves and their friends, with snobbishness and frustration spinning the plot. I almost felt sorry for Timothy, big hulking good-natured upper-crust Timothy, as much victim as criminal, simply looking for a little action at the country club and getting kneed in the groin instead. So he got drunk and raped his sister because he thought it would make him feel better, or because he wasn’t thinking at all. And that was his great secret, that was his terrible sin. I felt soiled by the story. It was such a shabby thing, such a pitiful thing; and now I would have to carry it around in my head forever. I couldn’t say a word to him. After what seemed like ten silent minutes he got heavily to his feet and shambled toward the door.

“All right,” he said. “I did what Frater Javier wanted me to do. Now I feel like a load of shit. How do you feel, Oliver?” He laughed. “And tomorrow it’s your turn.”

He went out.

Yes. Tomorrow it’s my turn.

37. Eli

Oliver said, “There was this day in early September when my friend Karl and I went hunting, just the two of us, chasing doves or partridges all morning through the scrubby woods north of town, catching nothing but dust. Then we came out of the trees and saw a lake before us, a pond, really, and we were hot and sweaty, for summer wasn’t entirely over yet. So we put down our guns and got out of our clothes and took a swim, and afterward we sat naked on a big flat rock, drying ourselves and hoping some birds would fly by, so we could pot them
—pow—
without even getting up. Karl was fifteen then and I was fourteen, and I was finally bigger than he was, because I had reached my full growth and passed him in the spring. Karl had seemed so mature and big a few years before, but now he looked thin and flimsy next to me. We didn’t speak for a long time, and then, just as I was thinking of suggesting that we get dressed and move along, Karl turned toward me with a peculiar look in his eyes, and I saw he was studying my body, my groin. And he said something about girls, how stupid girls are, what stupid noises they make while you’re laying them, how tired he was of having to make love talk with them before they’d let him get into them, how bored he was with their dumb floppy tits, their makeup, their giggling, how much he hated buying them sodas and listening to their chatter, and so on. He said a lot of stuff along those lines. I laughed and said, Well, girls may have their flaws, but it’s the only game in town, isn’t it? And Karl said, No it isn’t.

“Now I was sure he was putting me on, and I told him, I never went much for fucking cows or sheep, Karl. Or maybe it’s ducks you’ve been going with lately. He shook his head. He looked annoyed. I’m not talking about fucking animals, he said, in the sort of tone you’d use in speaking to a small child. That kind of shit is for morons, Oliver. I’m just trying to tell you, he said, that there’s a way you can get yourself off, a good way, a clean way, it doesn’t involve girls, you don’t have to sell yourself out to girls and do all the shit they want you to do for them, you know what I mean? It’s simple and it’s honest and it’s clear-cut, all the cards on the table, and I want to tell you something, he said, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. I still wasn’t sure what he meant, partly because I was naive and partly because I didn’t want to believe that he meant what I thought he might mean, and I made a noncommittal grunt which Karl must have mistaken for a go-ahead, because he reached over and put his hand on me, high up on my thigh. Hey, wait, I said, and he said, Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, Oliver. He went on talking in a low intense voice, words tumbling out of him, explaining to me that women were nothing but animals and he was going to keep clear of them for life, that even if he got married he wasn’t going to touch his wife except to make kids, but otherwise, so far as his pleasures went, he hoped to keep them on a strictly man-to-man basis because that was the only decent and honest way. You hunt with other men, you play cards with other men, you get drunk with other men, you talk with men the way you’d never talk with women, really opening yourself up, and so why not go the whole route, why not get your sex kicks from men, too?

“And as he was explaining this to me, speaking very fast, never once letting me get a word in edgewise, making everything sound almost rational and logical, he had his hand on me, putting it there in a very casual way, on my thigh, the way you might put your hand on somebody’s shoulder while you’re saying something to him, meaning nothing particular by it, and Karl was rubbing this hand up and down, up and down, still talking a streak, moving the hand closer and closer to my crotch all the time. And he was getting hard, Eli, and so was I, that’s what amazed me so much, so was I. I was getting hard. With an empty blue sky above us and not another human being within five miles. I was afraid to look down at myself, ashamed of what I knew was happening to me. That was a revelation to me, that another fellow could arouse me like that. Just this once, he said, just once, Oliver, and if you don’t like it I’ll never mention the subject to you again, but you mustn’t knock it till you’ve tried it, you hear? I didn’t know how to answer him and I didn’t know how to get his hand off me. And then the hand moved farther up, up to here, and even higher, and—look, Eli, I mean, I don’t want to get too graphic. If this is embarrassing you, just tell me and I’ll try to describe it in general terms—”

“Say it however you need to say it, Oliver.”

“Reaching his hand up and up, until his hand was clasped tight around my—around my cock, Eli, he was holding my penis, holding me there just like a girl might, the two of us naked by that little lake where we’d just been swimming, at the edge of the woods, and his words pouring through my head, telling me how we could do it with each other, how men managed it. I know all about it, he said, I learned it from my brother-in-law. You know, he hates my sister, they’ve been married only three years and he can’t stand her, the way she smells, the way she files her nails all the time, everything about her, and one night he said, Let me show you some fun, Karl, and he was right, it was fun. So let me show you some fun, Oliver. And afterward you tell me who gave you a better time, me or Christa Henrichs, me or Judy Beecher.”

The bitter odor of sweat was strong in the room. Oliver’s voice was hard-edged and sharp; every syllable came forth with the force of a dart. His eyes were glazed and his face was flushed. He seemed to be in some sort of trance. If it hadn’t been Oliver, I would have thought he was stoned. This confession was costing him some tremendous inner price; that had been plain from the moment he walked in, jaws rigid, lips clamped, looking weirdly uptight as I had seen him only a few times previously, and began his rambling, hesitant tale of a late-summer day in the Kansas woods when he was a boy. As the story unwound I had been trying to anticipate its route and guess its payoff. Obviously he had betrayed Karl in some way, I supposed. Had he cheated Karl in the division of the day’s catch? Had he stolen ammunition from Karl when his friend’s back was turned? Had he shot Karl dead in some sudden quarrel and told the sheriff it was an accident? None of those possibilities persuaded me; but I was unprepared for the actual turn in the narrative, the wandering hand, the skillful seduction. The rural background—guns and wild game and woods—had misled me; my simple-minded image of Growing Up In Kansas left no room for homosexual adventures and other manifestations of what to me was a purely urban species of decadence. Yet here was Karl, the virile huntsman, groping innocent young Oliver, and here was an older Oliver crouching before me pulling the reluctant words from his bowels. The words became less reluctant; Oliver was caught up in the rhythms of his tale, now, and, though his anguish seemed no less, his flow of description became more copious, as if he took some masochistic pride in baring this episode to me: it was not so much a confession as an act of abasement. The story rolled inexorably on, liberally embellished with telling detail. Oliver portraying his maidenly shyness and uneasiness, his gradual succumbing to Karl’s earnest sophistries, the critical moment when his uncertain hand at last sought Karl’s body. Oliver spared me nothing. Karl had not been circumcised, I learned, and in case I might not be familiar with the anatomical implications of that fact Oliver carefully explained to me the appearance of an uncircumcised member, both flaccid and erect. He told me also of the manual caresses and of his indoctrination into the oral joys, and finally he painted the picture of the two sinewy young male bodies writhing in elaborate copulation beside the pond. There was Bible Belt fervor in his words: he had committed an abomination, he had dabbled in the sins of Sodom, he had fouled himself unto the seventh generation, all in that one afternoon of boyish fun. “All right,” I wanted to say, “all right, Oliver, so you made out with your pal, why stretch it into such a big
megillah?
You’re still basically hetero, aren’t you? Everyone fools around with other boys when he’s a kid, and Kinsey told us a long time ago that at least one male adolescent out of three goes to the point of climax with—” But I said not a word. This was Oliver’s big moment and I didn’t want to put him down. This was his shaping trauma, this was the fiery-eyed demon that rode him, and he was letting it all hang out for my inspection. He had awesome momentum now. He swept me grandly along to the final orgasmic spurt, and then sat back, spent, dazed, face going slack, eyes going dull. Waiting for my verdict, I guess. What could I say? How could I pass judgment on him? I said nothing.

“What happened afterward?” I asked at last.

“We took a swim and cleaned ourselves up and got dressed and went and shot some wild ducks.”

“No, I mean
afterward.
Between Karl and you. The effect on your friendship.”

“On our way back to town,” Oliver said, “I told Karl that if he ever went near me again I’d blow his fucking head off.”

“And?”

“He never went near me again. A year later he lied about his age and joined the marines and got killed in Vietnam.” Oliver looked at me challengingly, evidently awaiting another question, something he was sure I must inevitably ask, but I had no more questions; the sheer inconsequentiality, the irrelevance, of Karl’s death had broken the narrative thread for me. There was a long pause. I felt foolish and inarticulate. Then Oliver said, “That was the only time in my life I ever had any sort of gay experience. Absolutely the only time. You believe me, don’t you, Eli?”

“Of course I do.”

“You better. Because it’s true. There was that once with Karl, when I was fourteen, and that was all. You know, one reason I agreed to have a gay roommate was as a sort of test, to see whether I could be tempted, to learn where my natural inclinations lay, to find out whether what I did that day with Karl was a one-shot, a fluke, or if it would happen again if there was the opportunity. Well, there was the opportunity, all right. But I’m sure you know I’ve never made it with Ned. You know that, don’t you? The question of a physical relationship just hasn’t ever come up between Ned and me.”

“Of course.”

His eyes were on me, fierce again. Still waiting, Oliver? For what?

He said, “There’s just one thing else I have to say.”

“Go on, Oliver.”

“Just one thing. A little footnote, but it carries the whole point of the story, because it isolates the guilt for me. Where the guilt lives, Eli, isn’t in what I did. It’s in how I
felt
about what I did.” A nervous chuckle. Another pause. He was having trouble getting his one last thing said. He looked away from me. I think he was wishing he had left well enough alone and had ended his confession five minutes before. At length he said, “I’ll tell you. I enjoyed it, Eli. With Karl. I got a real thrill out of it. My whole body seemed to be erupting. It may have been the biggest kick of my life. I never went back for a second time, because I knew that kind of thing was wrong. But I wanted to. I still want to. I’ve always wanted to.” He was shaking. “I’ve had to fight it, every minute of my life, and I never realized until just a short while ago how hard I actually was fighting. That’s all. That’s the whole thing, Eli, right there. That’s all I have to say.”

38. Ned

Enter Eli, somber, shuffling, mantled in rabbinical gloom, a stoop-shouldered personification of the Wailing Wall, two thousand years of sorrow on his back. He is down. Very far down. I had noticed, we all had noticed, how well Eli was responding to life in the House of Skulls; he had been up since the day we got here, far up and cresting, as up as I had ever seen him. Not any more. For the past week he’d been heading downward. And these few confessional days seemed to have thrust him into the uttermost abyss. Sad eyes, drooping mouth. The quirky grimace of self-doubt, self-contempt. He radiates a chill. He is
veh-is-mir
made flesh. What buggest thou, beloved Eli?

We rapped a bit. I felt free and loose, pretty far up myself, as I had been for three days, since dumping the tale of Julian and The Other Oliver onto Timothy. Frater Javier knows his business; ventilating all that garbage was exactly what I needed. Getting it into the open, analyzing it, discovering which part of the episode was the part that was hurting me. So now with Eli I was relaxed and expansive, my usual mild maliciousness altogether absent; I had no wish to needle him, but simply sat waiting, the coolest kind of cat I had ever been, ready to receive his pain and ease him of it. I expected him to blurt out his confession in a soul-clearing hurry, but no, not yet, indirection is Eli’s hallmark; he wanted to talk of other things. How, he wondered, did I evaluate our chances in the Trial? I shrugged and told him that I rarely thought about such things and simply went through our daily round of weeding and meditating and exercising and screwing, telling myself that every day in every way I was getting closer and closer to the goal. Eli shook his head. A sense of impending failure obsessed him. He had been confident at first that our Trial would have a successful outcome, and the last vestiges of skepticism had dropped from him; he believed implicitly in the truth of the Book of Skulls and believed also that its bounty would be extended to us. Now his faith in the Book was unshaken but his self-confidence was shattered. He was convinced that a crisis was approaching that would doom our hopes. The problem, he said, was Timothy. Eli felt certain that Timothy’s tolerance for the skullhouse was virtually at its end and that in another couple of days he’d take off, leaving us stranded in an incomplete Receptacle.

“I think so, too,” I said.

“What can we do about it?”

“Not much. We can’t force him to stay.”

“If he goes, what happens to us?”

“How do I know, Eli? I guess we’ll be in trouble with the fraters.”

“I won’t let him leave,” Eli said with sudden vehemence.

“You won’t? How do you propose to stop him?”

“I haven’t worked it out yet. But I won’t let him leave.” His face contorted into a tragic mask. “Oh, Jesus, Ned, don’t you see, it’s all coming apart?”

“I actually thought we were getting it together,” I said.

“For a while. For a while. Not any longer. We never had any real hold on Timothy, and now he doesn’t even bother to hide his impatience, his contempt—” Eli pulled his head into his shoulders, turtlewise. “And this priestess thing. The afternoon orgies. I’m bungling them, Ned. I’m not gaining control over myself. It’s great to have all that easy tail, sure, but I’m not learning the erotic disciplines I’m supposed to be mastering.”

“You’re giving up on yourself too early.”

“I don’t see any progress. I haven’t been able to last for all three women yet. Two of them, a couple of times. Three, no.”

“It’s a matter of practice,” I said.

“Are
you
managing?”

“Pretty well.”

“Of course,” he said. “That’s because you don’t give a damn for women in the first place. It’s just a physical exercise for you, like swinging on a trapeze. But I
relate
to those girls, Ned, I see them as sexual objects, what I do with them has enormous significance for me, and so—and so—oh, Christ, Ned, if I don’t master this part of it, what’s the good of working so hard on all the rest of it?”

He disappeared into a chasm of self-pity. I made properly encouraging noises: don’t give up, lad, don’t sell yourself short. Then I reminded him that he was supposed to be making confession to me. He nodded. For a minute or more he sat in silence, distant, rocking back and forth. At last he said, suddenly, with startling irrelevance, “Ned, are you aware that Oliver is gay?”

“It must have taken me all of five minutes to discover it.”

“You
knew?
”

“It takes one to tell one, haven’t you ever heard that line? I saw it in his face the first time I met him. I said, this man is gay whether he knows it or not, he’s one of us, it’s obvious. The glassy eyes, the tight jaw, the look of repressed longing, that barely concealed ferocity of a soul that’s in pain because it’s not allowed to do what it desperately wants to do. Everything about Oliver advertises it—the self-punishing academic load, the way he goes about his athletic commitments, even his compulsive studding. He’s a classic case of latent homosexuality, all right.”

“Not latent,” Eli said.

“What?”

“He’s not just
potentially
gay. He’s had a homosexual experience. Only one, true, but it made a profound impression on him, and it’s colored all of his attitudes since he was fourteen years old. Why do you think he asked you to room with him? It was to test his self-control—it’s been an exercise in stoicism for him, all these years when he hasn’t let himself touch you—but you’re what he wants, Ned, did you realize that? It’s not just latent. It’s conscious, it’s just below the surface.”

I looked strangely at Eli. What he was saying was something I might perhaps turn to my own great advantage; and aside from the hope of personal gain from Eli’s revelation, I was fascinated and astonished by it, as one always is by intimate gossip of that sort. But it gave me a queasy feeling. I was reminded of something that had happened during my summer in Southampton, at a drunken, bitchy party where two men who had been living together for about twenty years got into an exceptionally vicious quarrel, and one of them suddenly ripped the terrycloth robe from the other, showing him naked to all of us, revealing a fat jiggling belly and an almost hairless crotch and the undeveloped genitals of a ten-year-old boy, and screaming that this was what he’d had to put up with all those years. That moment of exposure, that catastrophic unmasking, had been a source of delicious cocktail-party chatter for weeks afterward, but it left me sickened, because I and everyone else in that room had been made involuntary witness to someone else’s private agony, and I knew that what had been stripped bare that day was not merely someone’s body. I had not needed to know what I learned then. Now Eli had told me something that might be useful to me in one way but which in another had transformed me without my bidding into an intruder in another man’s soul.

I said, “Where’d you find all this out?”

“Oliver told me the other night.”

“In his confes—”

“In his confession, yes. It happened back in Kansas. He went hunting in the woods with a friend of his, a kid a year older than he was, and they stopped for a swim, and when they came out of the water the other fellow seduced him, and it turned Oliver on. And he’s never forgotten it, the intensity of the situation, the sheer physical delight, although he’s taken care never to repeat the experience. So you’re absolutely correct when you say that it’s possible to explain a lot of Oliver’s rigidity, his obsessive character, in terms of his constant efforts to repress his—”

“Eli?”

“Yes, Ned?”

“Eli, these confessions are supposed to be confidential.”

He nibbled his lower lip. “I know.”

“You’re violating Oliver’s privacy by telling me all this. Me, of all people.”

“I know I am.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“I thought you’d be interested.”

“No, Eli, I won’t buy that. A man of your moral perception, of your general existential awareness—balls, man, you don’t just have gossip-peddling on your mind. You came in here intending to betray Oliver to me. Why? Are you trying to get something started between Oliver and me?”

“Not really.”

“Then why’d you tell me about him?”

“Because I knew it was wrong.”

“What kind of half-assed reason is that?”

He gave me a funny chuckle and an embarrassed grin. “It provides me with something to confess,” Eli said. “I regard this breach of confidence as the most odious thing I’ve ever done. To reveal Oliver’s secret to the one person most capable of taking advantage of his vulnerability. Okay, I’ve done it, and now I formally confess that I’ve done it.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
The sin has been committed right before your eyes, and give me absolution, will you?” He rattled the words out so fast that for an instant I couldn’t follow the Byzantine convolutions of his reasoning. Even after I understood, I wasn’t able to believe that he was serious.

Finally I said, “That’s a cop-out, Eli!”

“Is it?”

“It’s cynical shit that wouldn’t even be worthy of Timothy. It violates the spirit and maybe the letter of Frater Javier’s instructions. Frater Javier didn’t intend us to commit sins on the spot and then instantly repent of them. You have to confess something real, something out of your past, something that’s been burning your guts for years, something deep and poisonous.”

“What if I have nothing of that kind to confess?”

“Nothing, Eli?”

“Nothing.”

“You never wished your grandmother would drop dead because she made you put on a clean suit? You never peeked into the girls’ shower room? You never pulled the wings off a fly? Can you honestly say you have no buried guilts at all, Eli?”

“None that matter.”

“Can you be the judge of that?”

“Who else?” He was fidgeting now. “Look, I would have told you something else if I had anything to tell. But I don’t. What’s the use of making a big scene out of pulling the wings off flies? I’ve led a piddling little life full of piddling little sins that I wouldn’t dream of boring you with. I didn’t see any way I could possibly fulfill Frater Javier’s instructions. Then at the last moment I thought of this business of violating Oliver’s confidence, which I’ve now done. I think that’s sufficient. If you don’t mind I’d like to leave now.”

He moved toward the door.

“Wait,” I said. “I reject your confession, Eli. You’re trying to make me go along with an
ad hoc
sin, with willed guilt. Nothing doing. I want something real.”

“What I told you about Oliver is real.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I have nothing to give you.”

“This isn’t for me, Eli. It’s for you, your own rite of purification. I’ve been through it, Oliver has, even Timothy, and here you stand, putting down your own sins, pretending that nothing you’ve ever done is worth feeling guilty about—” I shrugged. “All right. It’s your own immortality you’re screwing up, not mine. Go on. Go. Go.”

He threw me a terrible look, a look of fear and resentment and anguish, and hurried from the room. I realized, after he was gone, that my nerves were stretched taut: my hands were shaking and a muscle in my left thigh was jumping. What had strung me out this way? Eli’s cowardly self-concealment or his revelation of Oliver’s availability? Both, I decided. Both. But the second more than the first. I wondered what would happen if I went to Oliver now. Staring straight into those icy blue eyes of his. I know the truth about you, I’d say in a calm voice, a quiet voice. I know all about how you were seduced by your pal when you were fourteen. Only don’t try to tell me it was a seduction, Ol, because I don’t believe in seductions, and I have some knowledge of the subject. Being seduced isn’t what brings you out, if you’re gay. You come out
because you want to,
isn’t that so? It’s in you from the start, it’s programmed into your genes, your bones, your balls, it’s just waiting for the right occasion to show itself, and somebody gives you that occasion and that’s when you come out. All right, Ol, you got your chance, and you loved it, and then you spent seven years fighting against it, and now you’re going to do it with me. Not because my wiles are irresistible. Not because I’ve stupefied you with drugs or booze. It won’t be a seduction. No, you’ll do it because you want to, Ol, because you’ve always wanted to. You haven’t had the courage to let yourself do it. Well, I’d tell him, here’s your chance. Here I am. And I’d go to him, and I’d touch him, and he’d shake his head and make a rattling, coughing noise deep in his throat, still fighting it, and then something would snap in him, a seven-year tension would break, and he’d stop fighting. He’d surrender, and we’d make it at last. And afterward we’d lie close together in an exhausted sweaty heap, but his fervor would cool as it always does just afterward, and the guilt and shame would rise up in him, and—I could see it so vividly!—he would beat me to death, clubbing me down, smashing me against the stone floor, staining it with my blood. He’d stand above me while I twitched in pain, and he’d howl at me in rage because I had shown him to himself, face to face, and he couldn’t bear the knowledge of what he had seen in his own eyes. All right, Ol, if you have to destroy me, then destroy me. That’s cool, because I love you, and so whatever you do to me is cool. And it fulfills the Ninth Mystery, doesn’t it? I came here to have you and die, and I’ve had you, and now at the proper mystic moment I’m going to die, and it’s cool, beloved Ol, everything’s cool. And his tremendous fists crush my bones. And my broken frame twists and writhes. And is finally still. And the ecstatic voice of Frater Antony is heard on high, intoning the text of the Ninth Mystery as an invisible bell tolls, dong, dong, dong, Ned is dead, Ned is dead, Ned is dead.

The fantasy was so intensely real that I began to shiver and quake; I could feel the force of that vision in every molecule of my body. It seemed to me that I had already been to Oliver, had already grappled with him in passion, had already perished beneath his flaming wrath. Thus there was no need for me to do these things now. They were over, accomplished, encapsulated in the sealed past. I savored my memories of him. The touch of his smooth skin against me. The granite of his muscles unyielding to my probing fingertips. The taste of him on my lips. The flavor of my own blood, trickling into my mouth as he began to pummel me. The sense of surrendering my body. The ecstasy. The bells. The voice on high. The fraters singing a requiem for me. I lost myself in visionary reverie.